AMEN Australia 2012: Right Arm, Right Approach, Right Now

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Adventist Medical Evangelism Network Australia

Ross Grant

Why Should I Change My Lifestyle?

Look, it is a privilege to be invited here, and I was just reflecting what sort of things am I going to bring to this this afternoon.

You've got a terrific program here, which has, I think, been extremely supportive to the clinical groups, those that are working in clinical practice, whether it's the physicians or the dieticians or the chiropractors, pardon me, or the nurses.

Now my role as an academic and a researcher, What do I actually bring to the table?

Now I'm not sure if my… Let me have a look at that.

What I do want to talk about is the relationship between lifestyle, ageing and free radical damage.

What I'm hoping to do here is develop or at least present a perspective, a model if you like, for which you can start to see some of the things that Dr Schaefenberg, which Tim has talked about, and which Skip have all talked about in relation to health.

I want you to try and understand some of the mechanisms which might make us a little bit more intelligent about how we imply it.

I shouldn't apologise for anything up front, but it's something I can't help doing.

I've tried to make it as clear as possible.

We're going to run through a couple of things here, and in half an hour it doesn't give me a lot of time to give detail, but please ask questions if there are more detail that you want.

We're actually the – well, I'm the head of the Australasian Research Institute.

I have had a full-time academic appointment at the University of New South Wales in pharmacology, as Nick was saying last night.

But about 8 years ago, we sort of eventually got a research centre at the Sands, saying this is an institution that has been around for over 100 years and we didn't actually have dedicated research, although ad hoc sort of stuff was going on.

But we felt that it was necessary to do it within the context of this hospital because this was a hospital that was established around keeping people well, and not only keeping people well but teaching them how to stay well.

Always an acute care facility, but we felt that we needed to do a little bit more work there.

So we actually got, we call it the pool house.

It's just next to the pool and it is a demandable.

We have our offices and that sort of thing in the front and our lab at the back.

Now, we collaborate with a lot of people and because I still have some broad academic connections, I have some great collaborators that like to work with us.

But we have a motto, and that is discovering the science of wellness.

Now I hope that that means something to you at the end.

As I say, as I walk through, I want to be able to look at, in a sense, mechanisms producing these lifestyle diseases that we've talked about, and then hopefully take you through how that might look like, broadly speaking, at least in principle, about how we might be able to integrate that into our current healthcare practice.

So Sydney Adventist Hospital is our primary 95% stakeholder, and then Avondale Sanitarium and Adventist Health, all are members of our board.

This is something that will be familiar to all of you, and this is not anything of a surprise.

Leading causes of death in Australia, 16 per cent are the ischemic heart diseases, 8 per cent, stroke, dementia, particularly Alzheimer's, 6 per cent.

The sort of respiratory diseases, around about 9 per cent, diabetes about 3 per cent, and then you've got a number of others.

This is sort of running to be around about 50 per cent of the diseases that cause death in Australia actually have a strong link to both age and lifestyle choices.

Now I want you to think, and I'll hopefully get you to think about what it means to actually have these diseases, this degenerative process, and why there is a link certainly between age and lifestyle choices.

But as Dr Schaffenberg was saying, we're all actually ageing, probably, at least in the community, a lot faster than what we need to.

Well underpinning a lot of that, the research that's been around now for a little while but is becoming much more clear, this concept of oxidative stress.

Now, how many people have heard of oxidative stress?

Now if I say free radical damage, of course, everybody will have heard of it.

And Essentially, for the purposes of what I'm talking about now, oxidative stress is really when free radical damage has got to the point where it's actually causing more damage to the tissue than it can actually cope with and repair.

This is a case of lots of oxidative stress.

Certainly the pathophysiology when the – I call them the boffins that look in the laboratory and they sort of open apart that bit of vascular tissue that might be taken out by a vascular surgeon somewhere, looks at it and goes, oh, look at that.

We've got lots of this sort of carbonyl formation here.

They go, that's all inflammation, oxidative stress.

So there's no question that this plays a significant role, and it seems to underpin that pathological process.

So it's actually what's driving the damage to the tissue.

But let me just quote from Ellen White, and I like this 1.

Our bodies are built up from the food we eat.

Those foods should be chosen that best supply the elements needed for the building up of the body.

In this choice, appetite is not a safe guide.

Through wrong habits of eating, the habit has become perverted, or the appetite has become perverted.

Often it demands food that impairs health and causes weakness instead of strength.

The disease and suffering that everywhere prevail are largely due to popular errors in regard to diet." Now if that were true when she wrote it, which is around the turn of last century, it is certainly true of today.

So while we've actually had, and there has been, lots of work that have been done particularly around the nutrition deficiency diseases, and then associated with the antimicrobials or the microbial diseases.

What we've got now has been pointed out over and over again in essentially every talk is that we've got diseases of overnutrition, particularly high calories.

Essentially, this is creating problems that the body can't handle.

Hopefully we'll get a perspective on that shortly.

So just looking at it in relationship to age, you would all be aware of this, but I thought it would be good to put the statistics here in any case.

In terms of cancers, age distribution of all cancers in Australia, excluding some of the lung diseases, significantly increases after about middle age.

I'm going to show you some data that we published last year and how it relates to some of this.

But certainly cancer, and of course a Cancer is just a dysregulated genome, isn't it?

This is this rogue cell that wants to take over the body and it's got its evolutionary advantage.

That, of course, it's a little deaf, dumb and blind cell which has had something damaged to the signal that it would have normally listened to and it can't hear it anymore, so the only thing it knows how to do is actually grow.

Then ultimately some of those can metastasise.

We know, of course, depending on the tissue, it can become lethal.

But notice that that has to happen as a result of damage that's occurred to the genome, which has not been repaired, and then the cell, the other fail-safe, it hasn't died where it should have died.

So here you've clearly got an issue where somewhere around sort of the 58 mark, More damage is occurring than essentially is being repaired.

Then you've got cardiovascular disease, again going up fairly steadily.

And this is we're getting a lot more people down here than we should.

But certainly going up again with age, and this is damage to the endothelium within the blood vessel, and as was mentioned before, this is related to plaques, et cetera.

I'll talk a little bit more about that later.

But notice also that it's actually also in the dementias.

Now this is the prevalence of Alzheimer's disease, which really starts to kick up after the age of 60.

I actually came, and my wife considers me a sceptic when it comes to any of the sort of complementary areas.

I remember working, and I was interested only in really the neurodegenerative diseases.

We actually developed, in the research that we did, we developed a treatment that did seem to work in terms of reducing oxidative damage.

So it was very clear that oxidative damage was occurring.

The areas that I teach, actually, are pharmacokinetics, and I'm sure all of you will have enjoyed those.

But pharmacokinetics and actually the pharmacology of neurological disease or neurodegenerative disease.

So I was particularly interested in Alzheimer's and being able to stop those kind of degenerative processes.

Now we actually did develop a combination therapy that seemed to work.

We patented it and in fact even have sold it to a large multinational company.

But what was interesting about that is that it's almost pointless to actually give somebody a drug or at least something that might actually stop the process, almost pointless, when they already have started to develop mild cognitive impairment.

There is a significant loss of neurons at that stage and certainly neuronal connections before they even start to pick it up clinically.

What we need to do is actually pick it up way back here.

Now it's interesting, people like Dr Esselstyn, et cetera, which I'll show a little bit of his data later on, you can certainly reverse cardiovascular disease, but can you reverse Alzheimer's?

While there might be some, you can sort of get some and there are some progenitor cells we might be able to sort of wake up, it's almost certain that you won't be able to.

So you've actually got to come back way back here.

Now that was what actually introduced me to the whole idea of what's actually the risk factors for it.

How can you actually prevent this a lot earlier?

Why Should I Change My Lifestyle?

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